Creating new opportunity across our partner ecosystem in this AI era

The following is adapted from my remarks at our annual partner conference, Microsoft Inspire, this morning.

As a platform company, the most important thing we get to do is come together as an ecosystem with our partners, and reaffirm our commitment to innovate on behalf of our customers and to serve them across every community, every country, and every sector, especially during times of rapid change.

And there is no question that today we are in the midst of a massive platform shift.

There are two dimensions to this new era of AI. The first dimension is around the user interface. If you think about the arc of computing, the last 70-plus years has been a pursuit to create human-computer interfaces that are more intuitive and more natural. We have now arrived at the next big leap, which is natural language, and we get to exercise it across every application and every interface we build.

The second piece is around information management. The history of computing has been about digitizing people, places, and things, and making sense of them. In that context, we now have a new superpower: We have a reasoning engine that allows us to start with a draft for any activity or task we want to complete.

Together, these two dimensions will creative massive new opportunity, and it’s our partner ecosystem – all of you – that will enable us to deliver on our collective mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more in this new era.

Over the past six months, we’ve introduced Copilots for a wide range of roles and processes, and we’ve built a Copilot stack so that everyone can build their own AI apps and copilots – from the AI infrastructure, to foundation models, to the AI orchestration, to the user experience.

This combination of the Copilot stack and the Copilot ecosystem is what will drive what of we think of as the AI advantage for our customers:

At Inspire today, we made more than 40 announcements to help our partners and customers seize this opportunity. I highlighted five of them during my opening keynote.

Bing Chat Enterprise

First, we announced Bing Chat Enterprise, delivering AI-powered chat for work. This is the product that every CIO, CISO, and business user has been waiting for. With Bing Chat Enterprise, user and business data are protected and will not leak outside the organization. What goes in — and comes out — remains protected. Chat data is not saved, and Microsoft has no eyes-on access — which means no one can view your data. And, your data is not used to train the models.

In combination with Microsoft 365 Copilot, we believe it will fundamentally transform knowledge work. Yusuf Mehdi showed this in action:

Sales Copilot

Second, we announced the general availability of Sales Copilot, a new role-based copilot designed for sellers. Sales Copilot allows any seller to stay in the flow of their activity with customers. Whether they are responding in email or are in a Teams meeting, they are able to ground that customer interaction with CRM data — whether it’s from Salesforce or Dynamics 365 — and complete their task without having to go to their system of record. I believe every SaaS application category is going to be fundamentally rewired because of this capability.

Take a look:

Power Automate Process Mining

Third, we announced the general availability of Power Automate Process Mining. This is the toolchain that every one of us can use to map out business process, and then optimize that business process with the power of AI. Process mining helps you drive additional value in every customer interaction, every customer deployment, and every customer project that you are engaged in.

Azure AI Updates

Fourth, we announced a number of updates across Azure AI. Every one of these platform shifts that we’ve been engaged in across the history of our company has also come with an iconic, industry-shaping partnership. And, in this AI age, it’s the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI.

We love everything about OpenAI and what they stand for. They care deeply about AI safety. They care about their mission. And this shows in all the innovation that we’ve been able to deliver to date, and also what will come next.

And, today, I was thrilled to take what we’ve been doing with the Azure OpenAI Service and make it more broadly available, as we expand regional availability, increasing access in North America and Europe, and bringing Azure OpenAI to Asia for the first time.

As a company, we also love open source. And when it comes to AI, it’s no different. One of the things that I was also very excited to announce is that Meta’s Llama 2 family of large language models is coming to Azure and Windows. Developers can now use Azure AI to take advantage of the best frontier and open source models, which Jessica Hawk showed during the keynote:

Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program

Finally, we also announced the new Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program. Through the initiative, we’re providing partners with a comprehensive portfolio of investments for all partner business models at every stage of maturity, from startups to independent software vendors, services to device partners, so they can take advantage of everything that this AI age has to offer, and drive business growth for themselves and our customers.

An example is our partnership with Epic, which is not only bringing all of their software to the cloud but is now also taking advantage of advances in AI with Nuance DAX to transform the doctor-patient experience, and fundamentally changing all clinical workflow through their innovation on top of Azure OpenAI.

It’s a great example of an ISV that is taking the next step forward with this platform shift and having an impact in one of the most critical sectors of our economy.

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I closed out on three points related to both our opportunity and responsibility. The first is our enterprise guarantees around AI. We want to be very clear that our customers’ data is their own data, that none of that data is being used to train or enrich foundation AI models, and that all of their data and all of their AI models will be protected using the best enterprise security infrastructure.

The second is our overall differentiation. We not only have the most comprehensive tech stack, but we always take a platform-first approach. We have a business model that is aligned with you, and that is aligned with the success of our customers and the communities and countries we serve. And lastly, we build trust in how we operate and how we do business.

And, finally, we don’t build technology for technology’s sake. We build technology so that we can empower every person and every organization in every community, in every country, across every segment, across every industry sector in the world. That’s what brings us together. That’s what makes us unique. And that’s what gives us real meaning in the work we do.

Thank you to our 400,000 partners around the world for making our mission real every day. Our Microsoft Partner of the Award honorees exemplify what’s possible.

Here’s a look at the impact they are already having in this new age of AI: